Deliciously dark tales to light up the RSC’s Christmas season

Two new productions open at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon this winter to sprinkle some fairytale magic and a touch of darkness during the festive period.

It’s that time of the year, as the days shorten and nights begin to stretch on forever, when only stories that court the dangerous glamour of winter’s shadows seem to satisfy. What better way to escape the season’s gloom than into a magical fairytale world in search of comfort and reassurance?

Except, cautions playwright Nancy Harris, whose new version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes takes up residency in the Swan Theatre over the Christmas season, be careful what you wish for.

"Our tendency is to sugar-coat fairytales and whitewash out the gnarly elements, but what if we didn’t do that? They’ve evolved to be sweet and nice, but the originals are dark and scary. There’s always a threat, and they always shock," she says.

Updated to the here-and-now, The Red Shoes is very much a show for families, Harris insists. "Things can often be too scary for adults, but children are braced for a more complicated view of the world. We’ve stayed true to the original but offered something exuberant, exciting and magical."

This is not to deny, she adds, the darker aspects of Andersen’s story.

"The Red Shoes begins with a death, as many fairytales do, leaving an orphaned child in a suddenly unfamiliar world. Fairytales are warnings to children about how to survive the world they’re growing into. But they also offer solutions in dealing with it: be aware, be cunning, use your wiles," Harris says.

At its heart is newly orphaned Karen (Nikki Cheung in her RSC debut), who, like any 16-year-old, "doesn’t always do the right thing; she’s not a perfect heroine".

Suddenly finding herself in a strange, discomforting world, she is surrounded by familiar fairytale characters, including the wicked stepmother, the feckless stepfather and the fairy godmother.

"The characters are grotesque and fantastic, but they are truthful; they all have their own human stories beneath their surfaces," Harris explains.

Magic has a place, too, with Karen’s discovery of a pair of enchanted shoes helping her to escape into a better place, albeit at a terrible price.

"After the death, it opens out into the fantastical where we have to work out what the rules of the world we’re watching are, as the story moves between the real and the unreal. Something awful happens to Karen, but she survives and endures," Harris explains.

Hard-earned lessons that might seem at odds with the season of goodwill.

‘Christmas is a time to allow ourselves to be childlike again’

"Christmas is a time to allow ourselves to be childlike again," Harris says. "In the theatre, you have to look at the world through a playful eye. There’s a lovely feeling of being told a story, of being taken by the hand into an unfamiliar world that has magic and mystery and a ghostly quality.”

Those elements, Harris adds, are supplied in abundance by director-choreographer Kimberley Rampersad, set and costume designer Colin Richmond, lighting designer Ryan Day and composer Marc Teitler, with whom she teams up again following The Magician’s Elephant, staged at the RSC in 2021.

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